When­ev­er the world took a turn of which he did not approve, my late father used to mut­ter that it was “spawn­ing a gen­er­a­tion of vipers and nitwits.” It’s tak­en more than a gen­er­a­tion, but we’ve reached the point where the per­ilous­ly poi­so­nous and the dead­ly dumb  prevail.

One need look no fur­ther than the COP 29 cli­mate con­fer­ence (Slo­gan: “In Sol­i­dar­i­ty for a Green World”) for proof.
As if hold­ing it in a pet­rostate with a rep­u­ta­tion for cor­rup­tion and repres­sion wasn’t dim-wit­ted enough, Pres­i­dent Ilham Aliyev’s, wel­come to Azer­bai­jan speech includ­ed this: “Unfor­tu­nate­ly dou­ble stan­dards, a habit to lec­ture oth­er coun­tries and polit­i­cal hypocrisy became kind of modus operan­di for some politi­cians, state-con­trolled NGOs and fake news media in some West­ern countries…:
COP 29 had 72,000 reg­is­tered par­tic­i­pants from 196 coun­tries, almost all of whom had to arrive by air, a “car­bon foot­print” of epic proportion.
More 1,700 of them were fos­sil fuel lob­by­ists.
To put that in per­spec­tive: the com­bined total of accred­it­ed par­tic­i­pants rep­re­sent­ing the ten nations most vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change was 1,033.
And if that wasn’t enough to stack the deck against get­ting even close to the fund­ing the con­fer­ence was sup­pos­ed­ly aim­ing to agree on, under U.N. rules, any agree­ment forged at the sum­mit must be approved by all 198 par­tic­i­pat­ing nations.
Accord­ing to cli­mate research experts, Sau­di Ara­bia has been cam­paign­ing since last year’s COP to stale­mate an agree­ment made there to tran­si­tion away from oil, gas and coal.
They’re about to get a “use­ful idiot” assist in the form of Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump‘s pick for Sec­re­tary of Ener­gy, Chris Wright. The CEO of a frack­ing com­pa­ny, he post­ed on LinkedIn last year: “There is no cli­mate cri­sis, and we’re not in the midst of an ener­gy tran­si­tion either.”
If the next COP is any­thing like this one – and why should we think it will break the mould — he’ll fit right in.

                               THEY’RE EVERYWHERE

In a move that may qual­i­fy for both viper and nitwit sta­tus, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is send­ing anti-per­son­nel land­mines to Ukraine. Grant­ed, they are so-called “non-per­sis­tent”,  in that they (most­ly) become inert after a pre-set peri­od of any­where from four hours to two weeks, but they’re still illegal.
An inter­na­tion­al treaty ban­ning anti-per­son­nel mines came into effect 25 years ago. Since then, 164 coun­tries have signed and rat­i­fied the agree­ment. Among the notable excep­tions are the Unit­ed States, Chi­na  and Russia.
Accord­ing to a report by the Inter­na­tion­al Cam­paign to Ban Land­mines (ICBL), 85 per­cent of the 4,710 peo­ple injured or killed by land­mines and explo­sive rem­nants of war (ERW) in 2022 were civil­ians. Half of them were children.

The Israelis are mak­ing a sim­i­lar bid to qual­i­fy as both vipers and nitwits. Although one doubts they give a damn either way.
Under their rules of engage­ment, the Israeli Defence Force con­sid­ers  any armed per­son in Gaza to be a Hamas fight­er, and has no qualms about blast­ing apart hos­pi­tals, tent camps, schools and refugee areas if they spot a pos­si­ble Hamas But when a con­voy of 109 aid trucks enter­ing Gaza by way of the Israeli-con­trolled  Kerem Shalom bor­der cross­ing was attacked and loot­ed by armed men,  there we no drone or mis­sile trikes or inter­ven­tion by Israeli troops,
In light of Israel’s oft-stat­ed claim that Hamas robs aid con­voys to sup­ply its forces, it seems fair to con­clude that either the Israelis have no idea what they are tar­get­ing, or are more than hap­py to occa­sion­al­ly con­sid­er Hamas a vari­a­tion of  cliché “one man’s ter­ror­ist is anoth­er man’s free­dom fight­er.”?

               THE MERE NITWITS

Appar­ent­ly unaware that unlike reg­is­tered health care providers, the social media net­work  “X” is not bound by patient con­fi­den­tial­i­ty laws, sub­scribers have been sub­mit­ting X‑rays, MRIs, CT scans and oth­er med­ical images to Grok, X’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence chat­bot, ask­ing for diag­noses. The rea­son: Elon Musk, X’s cer­ti­fi­able nitwit own­er, sug­gest­ed it.
On can’t help won­der­ing what Arab Amer­i­can vot­ers in Michi­gan think vot­ing Repub­li­can to “pun­ish” the Biden admin­is­tra­tion for its  stance on Gaza makes them, con­sid­er­ing that Trump’s ambas­sador-des­ig­nate to Israel, Mike Huck­abee, said of Pales­tini­ans: “There real­ly isn’t such a thing”,  and  “the title deed (to the West Bank) was giv­en by God to Abra­ham and to his heirs.”. (Both of those “beliefs” qual­i­fy him for viper AND  nitwit sta­tus, in my book.)
But the indis­putable nitwit title win­ner has to be “cryp­to entre­pre­neur” Justin Sun, who just paid $6.2‑million — for a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape.
Sup­pos­ed­ly, it “rep­re­sents a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryp­tocur­ren­cy com­mu­ni­ty.The gap between intel­li­gence and nitwit­tery, how­ev­er, remains unbridgeable.
The buy­er said he was going to eat the banana “as part of this unique artis­tic expe­ri­ence, hon­or­ing its place in both art his­to­ry and pop­u­lar cul­ture.”. As he does, per­haps he might like to con­tem­plate how many hun­gry chil­dren UNICEF and oth­er agen­cies strug­gling for funds might have fed with the money.
But then again, one doubts that would reg­is­ter with Mr Sun and his ilk, which goes some way to val­i­dat­ing the premise of this post, does it not?

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